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Economics provides powerful abstraction. To deploy that power the object of resource allocation must be correctly identified. The 1992 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the 2010 Nagoya Protocol (NP) define "genetic resources" as "material" despite being immaterial. The error has generated unresolved and contentious issues surrounding access and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from utilization (ABS). A correct classification of the object as "natural information" invites "the economics of information" with radically different implications for policy: bounded openness, tracking utilization through disclosure in patents and royalties shared proportional to habitat among "countries of origin." Human pathogens are a peculiar case of applying the same economics of information where the overarching objective is inverted: in situ eradication rather than in situ conservation. Because time translates into lives, incentives must be institutionalized for speedy entry of samples into the international medical research stream with sharing in benefits for utilization on a nuanced first-to-submit principle. As such the benefits would be greatest for just one country of origin which could then determine incentives within its scientific community. Researchers who have published work on pathogens in the first year of the NP (2011) were surveyed. The results support the application of the economics of information to ABS policy.

From the outset of the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the application of the economics of information to "access to genetic resources" appears in the published literature. The implications for "the fair and equitable sharing of benefits" (ABS) run counter to the policy discussion in the ten Conferences of the Parties to the CBD (1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010). Meanwhile the economics of information has become mainstream as witnessed by the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize and its incorporation in introductory textbooks by 2001. Through Google, Google Scholar and LexisNexis, the ABS literature is searched including and excluding the "economics of information" for the period 2002-2011. The hits differ by three to four orders of magnitude without any evidence of subsiding over the period examined. Such studied ignorance is distinguished from the mere lack of due diligence by exploring two examples from academic superstars who ironically have complained about their scholarship being ignored.

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